I'm a complete newbie to server administration, so I'm not even sure if I'm posting this in the right place. If this seems to be a bad question, please respond correctly. Thank you.
I have been wondering for some time how sites such as URL shorteners work. For example, a shortened url with the popular service bit.ly looks like: http://bit.ly/2bgrkx
My question is, how are their servers set up to handle these urls with unique shortcodes at the end? And also, how could this handling be implemented in an IIS environment, with a different purpose of course, not URL shortening. For example, I also saw what twtvite.com was doing with these urls.
I've considered that they could be possibly creating virtual directories that redirect, but that seems a little too out of the ordinary.
Thank you very much, I hope this question isn't too out-of-place.